Cornelia (Nina) Thompson

 The Work of Medical Museums: Collaborative approaches to understanding engagement, outcomes and implications for well-being

Medical museums are spaces where a particular past, that of medical practice, is mobilised for public engagement. Rooted in heritage studies, this project will use an interdisciplinary approach to understand what this use of heritage means in practice. In my master's research, I analysed affective/emotional engagement in medical museums and how such work may contribute to processing of personal medical experiences and trauma. This project continues that work with a focus on research methods that engage visitors directly and aims to better understand why people visit medical museums, what they feel they gain from their visits, how they feel during and after their visits and what this indicates about medical museums as distinct heritage spaces. Through considering these results alongside existing wellbeing frameworks and building on work around heritage effects on wellbeing (Chatterjee & Noble 2013), this project will also consider how medical museums may contribute to wellbeing. Research is conducted in collaboration with two London medical museums: The Anaesthesia Heritage Centre and the Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garrett.

The particular nature of medical museums makes them valuable spaces for conversations around health and illness on both personal and societal levels. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis makes these conversations more pressing and relevant to people’s lives. This project seeks to build a more complete understanding of what work is already happening in medical museums, build assessment tools to better understand visitor engagement, to propose useful frameworks for museum practice, and to suggest what may be possible moving forward.

Education

• BA, History with Geography Correlate, Vassar College, 2007
• MA, American History, The College of William & Mary, 2014
• MA, Cultural Heritage Studies, UCL, 2019